The Bohdan Jurij Krawciw Memorial Lectures in Ukrainian Literature

The Krawciw Memorial Lecture was established in the mid-1970s in honor of Bohdan Jurij Krawciw, poet, journalist, literary critic and a HURI associate from 1973 until his death in November 1975. The lecture series seeks to encourage scholarly discussions of Ukrainian literature with participation of leading literary critics, writers, poets, and playwrights and focusing on the issues that were of lasting interest to Bohdan Krawciw.

Bohdan J. Krawciw was born in the Dolyna region of Western Ukraine on May 5, 1904 and attended gymnasium and university in Lviv. His literary career began with the editorship of the newspaper Molode Zhyttia in 1919. His poetry and contributions to literary and public affairs journals were first published in the 1920s. After World War II Mr. Krawciw continued his literary and journalistic careers in West Germany. In 1949, he and his family emigrated to the United States, settling in Philadelphia. He became editor of Suchasnist, the Ukrainian literary journal published in Munich, and served as editor of Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopedia, the two-volume reference book published by the University of Toronto Press, in both its English and Ukrainian versions. For a number of years Mr. Krawciw was also editor of the Ukrainian daily newspapers America and later, Svoboda. He was a member of several scholarly organizations, including the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in the United States and the Shevchenko Scientific Society, in New York, NY. During the last years of his long and productive career, Mr. Krawciw was an associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, which in 1973 awarded him a research fellowship.

The first Bohdan J. Krawciw Memorial Lecture at Harvard University entitled "Jurij O. Ivaniv-Mezenko and Modern Ukrainian Bibliography" was delivered by Edward Kasinec, Research Bibliographer and Librarian of the Ukrainian Studies Program, on December 16, 1976. The program of the lecture has come to include opening remarks, reading of Bohdan J. Krawciw's poetry, introduction of the lecturer by the Director of HURI or a HURI Professor, and the Memorial Lecture itself, followed by discussion and reception. The traditional venue of the lecture has been the Exhibit Room of the Houghton Library of rare books and manuscripts.

LIST OF THE BOHDAN JURIJ KRAWCIW MEMORIAL LECTURES

2016 (Apr. 4) Rory Finnin, Head of the Department of Slavonic Studies, Director of Ukrainian Studies Programme, and Chair of Cambridge Committee for Russian and East European Studies, Cambridge University, "'A Bridge Between Us': Literature in the Ukrainian-Crimean Tatar Encounter"Listen